Look to the forests

Cambria

Some things are so obvious that we say to ourselves, why bother trying to point out the obvious to the obviously ignorant?

I just put down the Shredder’s “Death and taxes” (March 28). Shredder is right. It is wrong to tax, more than married couples, “gay couples … [who file} taxes separately.”

It is the singles who file separately, and, yes, they should not be victimized by unfair taxation discrimination that favors married couples.

The solution is to strike down as obviously unfair, if not unconstitutional, all laws that discriminate against half the population, single people, especially in taxation.

On the homeless front, Matt Fountain tells us SLO City nixed the proposed Prado Road land parcel for homeless services center, with a news photo showing a barren-looking parking lot (“Another site excluded for proposed homeless center,” March 28).

The answer to SLO’s homeless is again obvious. Look to the Chumash. They successfully maintained shelter for the homeless for many millennia with California’s inland oak tree woodlands and coastal Monterey pine tree fog forests providing food, water, and shelter for everyone from birds to bears, until the non-native European Americans destroyed them in the 19th century.

The solution is simple. Restore California’s forests for cool shelter during hot summer season afternoons, warm shelter during cold winter season nights, and all-weather shelter from the wind and rain.

The Cambria Monterey pine tree forest, the areas recklessly and deliberately destroyed in the last year alone, could have housed, easily, all of the county’s homeless, despite the claim that Cambria housing is too expensive, a reference to the dead-wood housing structures, not the living wood homes.

Stop SLO County, CalFire, and the local governing entities from continuing to destroy what’s left of California’s fragile endangered, vestigial forests, turning California into ever drier, more barren, more fire prone, more “wildlife habitat free,” more shelterless landscapes.